YOW! 2011: Bjorn Freeman-Benson - Software Psychology

Description

Bjorn Freeman-Bensonis the Vice President of Engineering at New Relic - which produces cross-platform application and server performance monitoring software as a service (SaaS). He's been an engineer for many years and has focused on building tools.

Here, we talk about client and cloud monitoring tools, Bjorn (of course!) and more. Bjorn describes himself as a Software Psychologist - he listens to software and makes it better after understanding it's deepest needs and problems. I like the sound of that! Another thing I like about Bjorn's optimistic outlook on software complexity is the notion of "drinking our own champagne" versus "eating our own dog food" when it comes to using the software you build - in a real world context, daily - before you unleash it on the world.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Bjorn! Keep on listening to software's deep issues and help correct them (hopefully without the need of powerful "medication")!

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

The Discussion

Good talk. Charles, agree that way forward for concurrency may be to do it less and copy more at least for shared state. As strange as that sounds. I have thoughts on a new sync primitive called "sync" that combines thoughts from monitor, reader/writer, and actors messages, but keeps things in the imperative world. Thoughts here. Comments welcome.

I've really been enjoying these YOW! chats, but the audio has been (literally) painful.

It sounds like you made a two-track recording — which is great, it's why your audio sounds so good! — but instead of mixing them down to one balanced stereo track, you just threw your track in the left channel and your guest's track in the right. This creates a "ping pong" effect that can give listeners using headphones a headache.

To avoid headaches, the audio doesn't have to be a 50/50 mix either; you can do something like a 67/33 mix, so you're louder on left and your guest is louder on right, but there's still some of you on right and still some of your guest on left.

@Chris Hanson: Sorry about that. Next time, I will do as you suggest. I simply didn't think about this while editing all of these videos. Of course, I wasn't wearing earphones while editing, but that's no excuse. Thanks for bringing this up.